Evan Minton's Blog, page 6

My Fallback Position On Genesis 1

I have written many blog articles defending The Functional Origins/Temple Inauguration interpretation of Genesis 1. This is the view most commonly associated with Professor John Walton of Wheaton College and is defended in his books “The Lost World Of Genesis One” and “Genesis 1 As Ancient Cosmology”. This view holds that Genesis 1 is not about material origins, but about functional origins. The days are 7 24-hour days, and over the course of these 7 days, God ascribes functions to everything in...

Addressing Lydia McGrew’s Criticisms Of The Lost World Of Genesis One

Dr. Lydia McGrew is an analytic philosopher who has published copious amounts of written, audio, and video content. I want to make it clear from the outset that I respect Dr. McGrew and have found her material concerning the historical reliability of the gospels to be very helpful. I wholeheartedly put my stamp of approval on her books such as “Hidden In Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences Between The Gospels and Acts”, “The Mirror Or The Mask: Liberating The Gospels From Literary Devices”, and ...

How To Fight The Culture War and Win

Are you tired of Drag Queen Story Hours? Are you tired of movies and television shows aimed at children needlessly including homosexual relationships in order to normalize homosexual relationships? Tired of the created order being upended by people who think gender can just be a matter of feeling and isn’t rooted in biology (One’s physical being)? Are you tired of little boys and girls having their genitals mutilated because Timmy likes playing with Barbie dolls and Sally likes monster trucks? T...

Cutting Off A Hand For Grabbing Testicles? A Look At Deuteronomy 25:11-12.

The Torah is full of all kinds of laws that Israel was to obey. That is why the first five books of The Old Testament are called “The Law”. However, some of these laws might not seem fair, or might seem bizarre and come out of nowhere (looking at you Baby Goat command). One such law is Deuteronomy 25:11-12 which says “If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her h...

Does Deuteronomy 28:63 Contradict Ezekiel 18:23 and Ezekiel 33:11?

As I was reading through my Bible, I came across a verse; Deuteronomy 28:63. This verse says “Just as it pleased the Lord to make you prosper and increase in number, so it will please him to ruin and destroy you. You will be uprooted from the land you are entering to possess.”

This verse is in the context of Moses giving warnings of judgment upon the people of Israel in the event that they abandon Yahweh and worship other gods (and/or other heinous sins). This seems to contradict Ezekiel 18:...

Why Doesn’t God Give Christians “Soul Tickets”?

The English dub for Bleach: The Thousand Year Bloodwar cour 2 of has finally come out. Those who know me know that Bleach is my all-time favorite anime. Here’s the premise of the show in a nutshell; it’s about a teenage boy named Ichigo Kurosaki who gains the power of the soul reaper and who helps souls pass on to the Soul Society while also defending both the living and the dead from deadly soul-eating monsters called hollows. It started off with a sort of “monster of the week” formula until ab...

Does Deuteronomy 6:16 Endorse Fideism?

It is definitely true what they say about going through The Bible over and over and over. You always walk away with more than you did the previous times. It is also the case, as the late Old Testament scholar Michael Heiser has said; that “Bible Reading is not the same as Bible Study”. Recently, as I have started going through The Bible again, a passage stuck out to me that made me stop, use my Logos Bible Software, and pace around the room puzzling until my puzzler was sore.

The passage is D...

The Cerebral Faith Podcast Going Forward

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I’ve made a decision. I’m going to go back to only do the podcast in audio format, pre-recorded. I made a list of all the pros and cons, and the pros just vastly outnumber the cons.

For one thing, I won’t have to go through all the work of making PowerPoint presentations to make the videos visually engaging. See, I wanted to make a series on the historical reliability of the gospels for YouTube and the podcast. But I don’t want to go through all the wo...

The Case For The Reliability Of The Gospels – Conclusion

We have now come to the final article in this series. Throughout this series we have seen good evidence that the gospels are historically accurate.

We’ve seen a ton of evidence for the trustworthiness of the gospels. In part 1, we looked at the traditional history of the New Testament manuscripts and saw that textual critics like Dan Wallace can reconstruct the original text to 99.99% accuracy. That 00.01% of uncertainty that remains has to do with only a few Bible passages that don’t really...

The Case For The Reliability Of The Gospels – Part 9: The Resurrection Of Jesus

The resurrection of Jesus is the most important miracle in the entire Bible. If it can be established that Jesus really rose from the dead, then Christianity is true and you are rational in deciding to pray that Sinner’s prayer, find yourself a church to join, and worship Him. One may wonder why the entirety of Christianity’s truth hinges on this one event occurring. I already said why in the introduction, but I don’t mind repeating it here.

Jesus claimed to be God. He claimed to be God mult...